10 Incredibly Useful LinkedIn Tools for Social Selling

Have you wondered if there is some third-party LinkedIn tools that will help you and save you time?

Want to learn more about the most effective tools to use in conjunction with LinkedIn?

LinkedIn has many features and functionalities that are constantly changing and adapting to the evolving needs of its user base.

However, there are a number of tools that were made specifically to enhance LinkedIn’s built-in functions. Whether your goal is to attract new prospects, create new connections in your industry, or increase the effectiveness and ROI of your social selling strategies, you’ll find that using specialized tools will enhance your results and your overall experience in using the LinkedIn platform.

Below is a list of 10 of the most useful tools to enhance your LinkedIn marketing and lead generation efforts. Check out what these tools can do, and why you should be using them right now. (Note: none of these are affiliate links and I do not earn any commissions for recommending these.)

10 Incredible LinkedIn Tools for Social Selling

Exactly what can you do with Crystal? Instead of the typical functions that you would normally expect from a LinkedIn supplementary tool, Crystal actually works as a contact analyzer of sorts.

Described as “the world’s largest personality platform,” Crystal gives you insight into the kind of personality that a particular LinkedIn user has. “Okay,” you might be thinking, “but so what?”

Now, that may not sound like much at first, but when you realize how this will enable you to carefully and specifically tailor your message to suit the person you’re communicating with, you’ll find the data you can get from Crystal to be indispensable and invaluable.

Get useful and data-driven insights on exactly how you should approach your prospect, no matter how little you initially know about them. With Crystal, you can craft the right message and apply just the right approach to get you to where you want to be with your prospect.

If you’re using Google Chrome, you’ll definitely want to try Dux-Soup for tracking the LinkedIn profiles you visit. Simply go through all the profiles that are of interest to you, and the tool will compile the profiles into a .CSV file for later reference.

It’s a database-building tool, essentially, that provides you with complete information on the profiles you visited, from their contact numbers and email addresses to their company affiliations and locations.

You can opt to use the free version (which enables you to view a hundred LinkedIn profiles a day) or upgrade to the paid version (which allows you to set the number of profile visits you need to make per day and export the .CSV file and make use of the data you gathered.

With its built-in functionalities, eLink Pro makes the task of connecting with potential prospects on LinkedIn so much easier and more convenient. You will no longer need to a long list of potential prospects manually.

Instead, all you have to do is input the keywords that are relevant to your business into eLink pro, and it will automatically search for the right matches for you. With eLink Pro, you can devote more time to developing ways to get these new contacts moving further along on their buyer’s journey, until they make the decision to buy from you.

As it is, eLink Pro is already an incredibly useful tool. What makes it even better, though, is that it processes the profiles of your potential prospects in bulk, and engages with them on Twitter for you.

Of course, it’s not recommended for you to automate every step of the lead generation process — after all, the all-important human element remains a crucial part of your strategy. Still, with the time you’ll be able to save, you can at least skip a couple of steps and let eLink Pro handle them.

If you want your online actions to have a positive impact on your business across different social media platforms, but don’t want to waste time doing them on your own manually, then IFTTT — which stands for “If This, Then That” — is the perfect tool for you.

The concept behind IFTTT is simple yet effective: Just formulate “recipes” to automatically cause a certain event to happen on one platform when you do the prerequisite step on another platform it’s connected to.

For instance, if you want to automatically share content on LinkedIn after you post it on your Instagram account with a particular hashtag, simply select that recipe, and it will automatically do that for you. And IFTTT can certainly act as support for your LinkedIn account in a number of ways. With over 160 LinkedIn ”recipe” options to choose from, IFTTT can make cross-platform social selling a breeze.

Have you ever wondered just how you could address the problem of people who visit your website, but don’t follow through on your call to action? These unknown visitors — and as you probably already know, they likely comprise a large portion of your daily traffic — are lost potential leads. That is, if you don’t do anything about them.

Therein lies the question: Exactly what CAN you do with these website visitors who don’t stay there in the immediate area for long?

Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t be able to track them down. Fortunately, with Leadfeeder, you can. Using Leadfeeder is quite simple. All you have to do is connect the tool with your Google Analytics account. This enables Leadfeeder to gather data on these users, such as their company details and common LinkedIn contacts in the company.

After you get this data, you’ll be able to connect and communicate with them based on where they are in the sales funnel. Additionally, Leadfeeder prevents you from wasting effort on spammers and non-existent companies, as it comes with a built-in filter that shows you only the results that would be relevant to you.

LeadFuze is is almost like an all-in-one tool for building your list of leads on LinkedIn. Not only does it make the process of finding the right leads so much easier for you (as all it takes is a quick search to get you leads from LinkedIn), it also automates the process of sending emails and follow-ups to these leads.

With LeadFuze, you can get your target audience’s contact information without having to use all kinds of different tools. This, combined with the automated email process, allows you to make the most out of all the leads you’ve collected, even with minimal effort on your part.

Out of all the customer relationship management (CRM) tools for LinkedIn out there, Nimble is one of the most useful. While it’s not completely free — a subscription will cost you $22 after the 14-day free trial — its features make it more than worth the price tag.

In addition to managing your contacts and pipeline, it also gathers information on customers from contact lists, social interactions (across various platforms, not just limited to LinkedIn) and even emails.

It lets you know which ones among your contacts are celebrating important events on specific days, giving you the chance to reach out to them personally and start a conversation. When used in conjunction with lead generation software, Nimble is a formidable tool for your LinkedIn account that will ensure that you’ll leave no lead behind.

Rapportive makes it super convenient for you to see all the information you need about a potential lead, as it gathers this information from their LinkedIn profile and delivers them straight to your Gmail inbox. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.
• Who is this? See their happy smiling face.
• Where are they? See if they're nearby, and arrange to meet.
• What do they do? See their job, company, and LinkedIn profile.

Additionally, the fact that Rapportive costs nothing makes this tool a no-brainer. You may use Rapportive as a Gmail add-on, or download the extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

In just about any industry, wasting time is an absolute no-no. That’s why LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides you with a unique and effective way to reach out to potential buyers and create efficient sales processes.

Its numerous offerings include custom lead recommendations, real-time updates on your prospects and customers, an advanced search feature for finding leads and companies that are just the right fit for you. It also allows you to see everyone who has viewed your profile over the last 90 days, and the ability to unlock the full LinkedIn profiles of leads who aren’t in your network. It is one of the most effective sales solutions tools available for B2B companies.

In a nutshell, Charlie App prepares you for any business meeting by letting you know all the relevant information it can find on the internet about the person you’re meeting. In advance of your meeting Charlie App will send you an email with everything you need to know.

This tool will save you so much time from having to do this research on your own — you’ll discover crucial information about your stakeholder’s company to common passions and hobbies you share. You’ll never run out of things to talk about, nor will you run out of ways to impress the person you’re meeting. Not with this ace up your sleeve, I guarantee.

While some professionals may find these social selling tools a little bit time-consuming to understand, the boost they can give to your social selling strategy cannot be denied. They just make things more convenient for LinkedIn users, and for that, they’re practically indispensable.

Wrapping Up

You don’t need to use all ten of these tools, start with reviewing the different functionality of each and find a few that make sense for you to use based on your business goals and objectives.

To paraphrase the old saying, though, it’s not solely about the tools you use — it’s more about how you use them.

Now that you know which LinkedIn tools you should have in your arsenal, take the next step and ensure you have a powerful LinkedIn profile and a well planned LinkedIn and social selling strategy so that you can harness these tools to grow your business.

If you would like help in developing a proven lead generation system for LinkedIn, I invite you to book a time to speak with me 1-on-1. Click here to schedule a call and get started filling your sales pipeline with leads from LinkedIn.